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Month: June 2016

Political satire is ridicule dedicated to exposing the difference between appearance and reality in public life. The justification for this mockery, going back to Aristotle, is that by holding bad behavior up to ridicule we might, as it were, “laugh folly out of existence.” Syllogistically, a la Aristotle, it might be put something like this:
1) Politicians behaving badly will be mocked.
2) Politicians don’t like to be mocked.
3) Politicians will stop behaving badly.
Now, how did that pan out? More than two millennia later, political folly is still as much with us despite the fact that political satire reaches more of the populace than ever before, as part of the entertainment industry. There’s now a veritable satiric-industrial complex. Furthermore, that populace is no longer